I recently decided it was time to upgrade from a netbook to a tablet. So I shopped around and I came across the new Nexus 7. The specs on paper are astounding; flaunting a quad-core Tegra 3 processor and one gigabyte of RAM. It can support all the games and HD movies you can throw at it; all displayed on a IPS 1280 x 800 7” screen.

When I first opened up my Nexus 7 I noticed how clean and thin Asus made the body of the tablet. It has a textured golf ball like backing. I had bought a case from Amazon, the Poetic leather case, which is a nice addition to the tablet allowing it to stand up and auto sleep/wake when the flap is closed and opened. The performance of the tablet is better than most and given its price it blows its competitors out of the water. Also worth noting is the temperature, while in hard GPU/CPU gaming it never gets above 32c. In average online surfing it hovers around 25-28c. What this means is this tablet is very efficient at temperature regulation, which while gaming is very important.

Other features it includes are the Live Wallpapers, which while they drain battery fast, are still very attractive to look at from time to time. Google also put the ability to switch between tabs on the home buttons. Instead of the standard menu button they replaced it with the “open apps” button, or tabs button as I like to call it. It makes an apps killer widget pointless, as you can quit out of any open apps with this button. One sad fact I do have in regard to supported software is Adobe Flash is no longer supported in Android 4.0+ so you won’t be able to play anything requiring flash player.

Overall the Nexus 7 is an amazing piece of technology. With its quad-core computing it is faster at opening the average app than its competitors and it doesn’t have many “force closes” while you switch between apps. I bought the 16gb version and if you decide on getting the Nexus I recommend you do the same. After adding all the apps I needed for note taking and various social networking I had taken up 4 gb. Then I threw in some music and a movie (which came with the tablet) and I’m at 8.5 gb now. The 16 gb seems like good number for the media hogs out there.